[gdal-dev] Driver maintenance - long-term solution ?

[Kurt Schwehr]

I mostly wanted to say that I'm here listening to the discussion and
thinking about all these issues.

On the technical side, I tried to publicly think about long term
maintainability / reliability of GDAL over the years.  It's always a moving
target, but here are a few of my old thoughts:

https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2016-May/044298.html
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2015-September/042680.html

Those leave out a lot and are dated.

On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 12:24 PM David Strip <gdal at stripfamily.net> wrote:

> Kudos to Howard for his succinct summary of the situation and the call to
> action. While I have nowhere near his experience with open source, my
> experience with other volunteer organizations reveals a similar pattern.
> One person, or maybe a small number of people, carry the burden of keeping
> the organization running. This goes on for years until someone burns out.
> Sometimes new people step before chaos sets in, but too often the
> organization begins a death spiral.
>
> Open source broadly is facing something of a turning point as commercial
> organizations have learned how to profit from open source, but have not yet
> learned they have to contribute to the commons. A particularly relevant
> example is the case of MongoDB where cloud services were offering paid
> hosting while paying nothing to support the project. Gdal's situation
> strikes me as similar. Large commercial vendors are embedding gdal in their
> offerings, either directly in software delivered to users or as part of the
> infrastructure behind the services they provide. Some of these companies
> are very profitable and could well afford to pay their way. Unfortunately,
> it is often the case that the developer who is aware of this reliance on
> gdal may not be in a position to convince his/her management to ante up for
> the "free" software.
>
> What is the path forward?  One path Howard suggests is establishing a
> foundation similar to that behind Qgis. Another alternative, probably far
> more controversial, is a license change. MongoDB created a license class
> directed at the cloud suppliers who were (morally) abusing the free license
> terms. gdal could adopt a license that requires those bundling gdal into a
> commercial product or service to pay their way. As I said, this would no
> doubt be quite controversial. Then there's the case of "second-order"
> free-riders. Gdal is critical technology underlying Qgis, another free,
> open-source project. Should firms that contribute to the qgis foundation
> also contribute to gdal, or can they rely on the appropriate portion of
> their "dues"  to be forwarded to gdal?
>
>
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